J. Jance - Hand of Evil

Dave nodded.

“So go to Vegas,” Ali told him. “Check into a hotel somewhere close but not too close to where they live. Call Rich and Cassie and let them come to you and be with you.”

“But I’m used to doing things,” Dave objected. “I’m used to taking action. If I’m just sitting around in a hotel room somewhere, I’ll feel utterly useless, even more than I feel right now.”

“Being there for your kids is doing something,” Ali insisted. “So is setting a good example about how to behave in the face of a crisis.”

Dave seemed to consider what she had said before he responded. “I just thought that if Roxanne wouldn’t let me come to the house, there wasn’t much point in my going.”

Ali shook her head. “You mouthed off when you probably shouldn’t have, but so what? From what I can see, Roxanne isn’t very high in decision-making skills, either. So go. Be there for your kids-for all your kids.”

Dave looked down at his watch. “If I left now, I could be there by midnight.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “You could. And if you’re really worried about taking a potshot at Gary Whitman, you could always leave your gun at home. Take some more pizza and leave the gun.”

Dave accepted another piece of cold pizza and gave her a halfhearted grin. “Maybe I’m not that worried,” he said. Pizza in hand, he started toward the door; then he stopped and turned back. “I guess I already knew what I should do,” he added. “I just needed someone to point me in the right direction. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “That’s what friends are for. But drive carefully. You won’t be of much use to your kids if you end up in a wreck somewhere between here and there. And call me. The moment you hear something about Crystal, call me. Day or night, it doesn’t matter.”

Dave sobered, his grin disappearing as suddenly as it had come. “I will,” he declared. “I’ll call day or night and let you know what’s happening.”

For a while after Dave left, Ali sat on the couch absently stroking Sam’s soft fur and wondering if she had given her friend the right advice. She had no doubt that Dave Holman was capable of using deadly force when necessary, but she also wasn’t at all convinced that his threat toward his ex-wife’s new husband was real. It seemed more likely that what he had said was nothing more than bluster, an empty emotional outburst provoked by his daughter’s unexplained disappearance.

Faced with a choice between blogging about this current crisis or perusing Arabella’s diary written sixty or so years earlier, Ali voted for immediacy by reaching for her laptop. Once it booted up, she began working on her post for the next day’s installment.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

We’ve all seen the headlines and watched stories like this unfold on the airways. A young girl, a teenager, inexplicably disappears on her way home from school or from a friend’s house. Eventually, concerned parents go to the police and report her missing. If they’re really lucky, an Amber Alert is issued, and their child is found.

Sometimes the missing child turns out to be nothing but a common runaway. Once she is reunited with her anxious parents, the family is left to cope with whatever it was that caused her to leave home in the first place. Sometimes the difficulties seem relatively minor-problems with a friend at school, a bad report card, or maybe a case of puppy love gone awry. Sometimes the reasons are much more troublesome and the finger of blame points directly back to unsavory conditions existing in the home itself. In families plagued by drug or alcohol abuse or where domestic violence and/or sexual molestation are the order of the day, leaving home can seem like-and sometimes is-the child’s only viable avenue for survival. And when runaway children are returned to homes like that, it’s often only a matter of time before they bolt once more.

We’re also all too familiar with other endings to this story-horrific instances where missing children disappear and never return home. They simply melt into the ether. Days or weeks or months later their remains are found and identified-close to home or far away. At that point what was once a missing persons case is suddenly transformed into a homicide.

Today a friend’s thirteen-year-old child has gone missing. She never made it to school this morning even though she was dropped off right outside the campus. She wasn’t reported missing until late this evening, a good twelve hours after she was seen walking in the direction of her first morning class. An Amber Alert has been issued, but her father fears too much time may have passed before that happened.

Yes, the cliches are all there. The girl is from a broken family-a divorced family-with the distraught father living in one state and with the mother, children, and new stepfather living in another. Some people are probably thinking this is nothing more than a custody dispute gone bad. But it isn’t that, not at all.

It’s bad enough for families to have to face this kind of crisis when a marriage is solid and intact. It’s even tougher to contemplate doing so when the marriage bond has been severed and the crisis must be faced alone.

And that’s where my friend is tonight-facing the loss of his daughter on his own. His former wife has a new husband, and the two of them are together in this difficult time. My friend is alone-alone and angry; alone and grieving. He came to talk to me earlier this evening. I did what I could to bolster him, but there’s only so much anyone else can do.

I have no idea how these events will sort themselves out in the course of the next few days. If it is a family dispute of some kind and if his daughter has simply run away, she may turn back up on her own when she gets cold enough or hungry enough or even tired enough. But it may turn out that something else is going on here-something more ominous than that. If foul play is involved, it’s likely the story will go public. For right now, and out of deference to my friend’s privacy and that of the other family members, I’m not identifying any of the players. There may come a time when that will change, when posting the missing girl’s information on this Web site may be used as a possible means for bringing her home.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to hope and pray that doesn’t happen.

While the post took its sweet time about uploading, Ali turned to her new mail list. There, along with a mountain of spam, was an e-mail from one of her regulars, Velma Trimble in Laguna Beach, California. Under the name of “Velma T in Laguna” she usually sent correspondence to the comment section of cutlooseblog.com. It was odd for her to write to Ali directly.

Dear Babe,

You’re the only person I can think of to write to tonight. You see, today I went to the doctor to get the results back from the biopsy for the lump on my left breast. It took almost two weeks to get the results back. I don’t know why it takes so long, but today was the day.

I had pretty well prepared myself for the fact that it was going to be bad news, and it was. Since I have a computer, I had gone to the various Web sites and looked up what I could expect in terms of treatment options-surgery, radiation, chemo. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be told not to bother.

“At your age,” this little whippersnapper doctor

told me, “there’s really not much point.” He’s probably all of forty-five and he should count himself lucky I didn’t whack him over his head with my walker. The problem is, I can’t get in to see an oncologist without a referral from my primary physician. And if he does give me a referral, what’s he going to say? “Here’s Velma, but don’t bother doing anything to fix her because she’s a useless eighty-something and curing her cancer isn’t going to be cost effective.”